Family Historian User Group

I'm not sure we do disagree, but I do think many people try to over-interpret what the DNA results are telling them. If I step back and take a look at my data from a global perspective, it tells me that I am roughly 97-100% British Isles, 0-3% German/Swedish and no discernible contribution from any ...

I think there is some misunderstanding in this thread on what Ancestry and similar "ethnicity" predictions are saying. It is worth reading the Ancestry White Paper on how they make the estimates ( https://www.ancestrycdn.com/dna/static/pdf/whitepapers/Ethnicity2020_white%20paper.pdf ). What they cal...

I think the way Ancestry present their story is very muddled, perhaps deliberately. One minute they’re describing how their estimates are based on reference panels of known trees, and in the next paragraph talking about Roman and Norman invasions! It’s not at all clear to me whether that is just flu...

Hadn't seen that, thanks - somebody needs a primer on the difference between precision and accuracy....

Anybody else had any surprising results from Ancestry's recent recalculations of UK DNA origins? Mine hasn't changed significantly (53-62% England & NW Europe, 0-36% Ireland, 8% bar) and feels about right - strongly English with a small amount of Ireland, but I've had one first cousin go from 60% Ir...

Thanks Jane, that’s perfectly clear. To answer Helen’s more general question, a potential conflict arises when there is a financial interest in the outcome of a discussion or activity. In this context, examples would include CP employing somebody to carry out an activity such as preparing documentat...

There’s a related issue that has been at the back of my mind for a while, but I think it is relevant here. There is clearly a nucleus of maybe a dozen or so people who make a very major contribution to FH, either here or elsewhere. I’d like to think this is all done for altruistic reasons, and we ar...

Can I request clarification on the rules of engagement for the FHUG Forum please? A recent thread made direct criticism of Calico Pie through an adverse comparison to a major market competitor. All posts in this thread have now been removed from public view. We don't need to recycle the censored pos...

Nothing at all wrong with FMP hints. It’s just that I prefer Ancestry as it has better coverage of London and the home counties, where I have extensive roots. I also want a (highly sanitised) version of my tree visible to other researchers and for DNA links. It is for CP to decide their priorities o...

There are really two separate issues here: Long development times - have you ever looked at the competition to see what the market expectation is in this area? I also use RootsMagic, as a tool to keep the Ancestry copies of my trees up to date so I can receive new match hints (a noticeable gap in FH...

I've used FTM in the past and still have it loaded, so could convert for you (and advise of potential issues I spot on importing to FH, as I assume that is your reason for asking). Send me a private message if you want me to go ahead. Remember though that you should not share your database if it con...

GEDCOM does not steer towards either split or lumped Source Citations. The fundamental problem is that FTM internally does follow the GEDCOM data model. Presumably you meant to say "does NOT follow..."? I can see why it doesn't, as GEDCOM does not cope properly with a lumped source cited for more t...

Certainly the choice of GEDCOM as the primary data storage format steers FH towards its preference for split sources, but that is not the reason for the incompatibility between apps. GEDCOM permits text at both the source and citation level, and FH does a pretty decent job of implementing that. The ...

I’m looking at the ability of FH to exchange source data with other popular apps (the native ability of the program, not via a community plug-in). I have a very simple test database containing one individual with a birth fact supported by both a separate split source and a citation to a lumped sourc...

My experience of doing this conversion is that there are really two separate processes going on. The mechanical repetition of converting all the lumped sources to separate ones while maintaining citations and image files can be handled by either a dedicated FH plugin or some other technique to proce...

I had a similar document for my great grandfather (illiterate, ran away from home when young, never spoke of his family), where I discussed why I had assigned his birth as I had. When the 1939 Register was released, the quoted date of birth matched, so my confidence increased from "most likely" to "...

Mike/Helen - read my last post again. I did not say longhand images were not available. They demonstrably are. The debate is whether the small number of typed copies (mostly very early births and marriages) were ever available in longhand form. I'm suggesting that they weren't, and nobody is produci...

Outside the USA education system, the Chromebook market for productivity applications is still pretty small, so expecting a tiny outfit like Calico Pie to support such a minority operating system is just not realistic. Not even the bigger Family Tree Maker and RootsMagic operations have taken that o...

Steve, I'm a Linux dabbler, not a devotee, but I did get FH running more or less ok on Mint 20 / Wine recently (see https://www.fhug.org.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=17920&p=102002#p102002 for the gory details ;). I've deleted it now, as it was just an experiment while I was upgrading hardware, so ...

Do you mean 1837online? They were the first to get the indexes on line (with limited searching, if I remember correctly) and later re-branded themselves as Find My Past. The GRO moved from handwritten indexes to typeset ones in the mid-1860s, so most volumes prior to then are longhand. The GRO produ...

I was looking through my old docs to see if I could find any more details about which versions of the indexes have been available when, and I came across this picture of the old St Catherines House search room taken from a 1987 OPCS leaflet. This was the only place where you could search the origina...

I’m old enough to remember using the printed quarterly indexes at St Catherine’s House in the 1980s, and the earliest years were definitely typed copies. I don’t know which versions were filmed (the original longhand or the publicly available typed copies) but it’s easily resolved - can you post an ...

Mike (L) - the GRO themselves started to copy the earliest indexes decades ago, but stopped as it was very labour-intensive and added little value. The old printed indexes in the public search room were these typed volumes, so that’s all we’ve ever had access to.

Do FreeBMD actually maintain two datasets? They certainly did the earlier ones first (and these seem to be the sets Ancestry use), but they don’t seem to distinguish in their results between earlier and later extractions. There also seems to some kind of agreement between the GRO and FMP, as the ext...

You could argue that FreeBMD is the “gold standard”, with two completely independent transcriptions, both largely done by native English speakers familiar with our names, and verifiable against an image of the original index page. Unfortunately, that still doesn’t eliminate errors in the index itsel...